I don’t consider myself a “gamer” because for many years I only played wow and diablo 3 without interest of other games until recently i’m interested in diablo 4 which doesn’t have a release date.
I primary use a PC at home for general/games but at work I use a Mac and I love the MacOS.
I hear gaming on a Mac isn’t ideal at all but could I get away with playing world of warcraft and potentially run diablo 4 decently on the base model 27 inch iMac?
- 3.0GHz 6-core 8th-generation Intel Core i5 processor
- Turbo Boost up to 4.1GHz
- 8GB 2666MHz DDR4 memory, configurable up to 32GB
- 1TB Fusion Drive¹
- Radeon Pro 570X with 4GB of GDDR5 memory
I used a 27 inch Mac for WoW back in 2015- it wasn’t amazing but sure, it works just fine. Best bang for your buck belongs to PC’s of course.
These days WoW runs as well on macOS as it does on equivalent hardware under Windows. When they moved its engine over from OpenGL to Metal it did wonders. I play WoW with a hackintoshed PC tower running Catalina and it runs beautifully.
For Diablo, unfortunately things might be more shaky. D3 runs fine, but so far Blizz has specifically avoided confirming platform support for D4 which is suspicious – typically Blizz announces Mac support right along with Windows support. The rumor is that Nvidia is currently having a weenie contest with Apple and is using their position as esports sponsor to pressure Blizzard into reducing support for macOS. I’m hoping things work out there but I’m not optimistic. At the very minimum though, you can always keep a Windows partition to boot into for some games.
For the 27" iMac specifically you’ll have to keep a few things in mind:
- You probably won’t be able to play at full 5k with high framerates. Even much more powerful custom built PCs have a hard time with 60FPS at 5k, so you’ll probably have to run WoW at 50% scale (2560x1440).
- The fusion drive is a weird union of an SSD and traditional hard drive, which can screw with performance and reliability. I would advise upgrading to a standalone SSD to avoid this.
- You’ll probably want at least 16GB of RAM, because 8GB will quickly fill with a few chrome tabs, Spotify, and WoW. Thankfully you don’t have to buy Apple’s overpriced RAM – it has a hatch on the back that’ll let you install a second 8GB stick.
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I thought the fusion drive was basically the same function as a Seagate Firecuda? Because I have one Currently and only saves files that I use more often, like if I constantly play the same game every day it starts preferring those files.
Fusion drive is similar to SSHDs, but not quite the same. With fusion drives, the SSD and HD are entirely separate units with all the magic making them appear as a single volume happening on the OS/filesystem level. This is fine in macOS but I have no idea how it’d be handled in Windows (if you’re dual-booting). Maybe Apple is doing some kind of magic on the EFI level to present the two drives as one on other operating systems, but I don’t know since I’ve never tried it.
The other thing is that the filesystem used in modern macOS versions, APFS, is very much designed for SSDs above all else. Its performance on regular HDs is horrifically bad, so should your regularly used files ever exceed the capacity of the SSD component of the drive (causing a read from the HD) you’re gonna see a big dip in performance. For current iMacs, the SSD portion of fusion drives ranges between 32GB and 128GB, which would quickly be consumed by a couple of regularly played games (WoW alone is ~70GB).
I generally like Apple but they should’ve moved the iMac to pure SSD a long time ago, like they did the MacBooks Air/Pro. Plain SSDs are just less trouble and Apple uses top-shelf Samsung flash under the hood so they’re fast and reliable too.